‘Have you ever felt you were in two moments at once?’ Tom Engelhardt (co-founder of the American Empire Project) asked himself this question in October 2005 as he was driving south to New York City ‘on a day when New Orleans had just gone under water and the president was stumbling to address the nation’. There he was, he recounted, ‘watching a world I knew well go by, no different than ever, and I felt as if I were slipping effortlessly through some future Pompeii’. He continued,

The sense Engelhardt had of living in two moments at once is one many of us feel about the global situation as a whole in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It is a Gramscian time, as was suggested in chapter 1, with the old dying and the new not able to be born.